Hasta La Gadget!

We heard News Corp’s “iPad newspaper” The Daily was on track for release in early 2011, but AllThingsD is hearing something more specific — week of January 17th, in fact, with the caveat that the launch plans have “moved around a couple of times in the past few months.” From what we’ve gathered previously, The Daily will be published daily (surprise, surprise) and cost 99 cents per week (about $4.25 per month) and might leverage a new App Store subscription payment system that could be announced at an Apple event. So… nothing definitive, really. Got that? Good.

News Corp’s ‘The Daily’ pub to hit iPad in January? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know that killer new app you just got for your iPhone? Could you beam us a copy to try? Of course you can’t — it doesn’t work that way — but someday soon it might. The fine folks at Patently Apple recently unearthed an Apple patent app that describes a way to transfer apps over peer-to-peer Bluetooth or shiny, star-filled WiFi. The idea goes that if a company wants to spread a program by word of mouth, it might as well make it shareable too, and so the owner of an app could transfer an “application seed” to friends and associates with a similar device. You’d pick from a menu of apps to beam over, where only those greenlit by their developer would be available to send, and your recipient would receive a trial version — or somewhat less excitingly, a link to the App Store — over the air. The patent app suggests that recipients could even share the demo in turn, generating generation after generation of word-of-mouth sales, and that companies might even reward particularly influential sharers in some way. What’s that rumbling we hear? Just the gears turning in the minds of men plotting the next great pyramid scheme.

Apple looking to patent sharable apps, considers calling them ‘seeds’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft just released — or should we say, Apple just approved — version 2.0 of the Bing search app for iOS devices. In addition to several other new features including integrated Facebook Likes on search results (really!?) and in-app checkins to Facebook and Foursquare, Bing now comes packing Streetside, something that first blew us away as Street Slide when it was still in the labs at Microsoft Research. Unlike Google’s Streetview that requires a lot of forward- and back-clicking and turning in order to get a feel for a location, Streetslide provides a more comprehensive view of the shops and businesses in an area by letting you strafe down the sidewalk while zooming in and out of the buildings located on each side of the street. We took it for a brief spin (literally) and came away impressed. You won’t find Streetside implemented for all locations yet (for example, San Francisco’s Make-out Room was found on Streetside but the Slanted Door restaurant wasn’t) but they do seem to have large swaths of major cities covered based on our brief testing of Chicago, Seattle, New York, and San Francisco. Sorry, nothing yet in London and Amsterdam but maybe you’ll have better success searching your own neighborhoods. See the full list of what’s new after the break in addition to a Streetside demo from Bing’s architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas — unfortunately, we’re not seeing the impressive Panaroma feature he mentions in this release.

Update: We’ve been told that Facebook Likes, like Panaroma, like totally didn’t make it into the app release. It’s a web search results feature only for the time being.

Continue reading Bing 2.0 brings better Facebook integration and the impressive Streetside to iPhone (video)

Bing 2.0 brings better Facebook integration and the impressive Streetside to iPhone (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 05:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Syncing an iPhone to a computer stinks: You have to physically plug in the device using USB, and iTunes still takes forever to copy your files. Apple hasn’t delivered a cloud-based iTunes yet, but a new iPhone app at least offers a wireless syncing solution for photos.

With the app Cinq, you can snap photos and save them straight into a folder on your computer even when you’re outside. Here’s how it works:

• You download the Cinq app for Mac or Windows to create a server on your computer. Register to create an account.
• Then you download the Cinq app for iPhone and log in with your Cinq account.
• From here on, you can pop open Cinq and tap the camera icon to snap a photo, and it will save straight into your Cinq folder on the desktop.
• You can also choose photos stored in your iPhone’s photo library and save them into Cinq.

It’s a pretty nifty app, especially for iPhone shutterbugs who haven’t gotten in the habit of plugging in and syncing to iTunes and iPhoto on a regular basis.

I just have a minor complaint: When choosing stored photos from an iPhone album to send to Cinq, we can only select one photo at a time. It’d be much more efficient if we could select multiple photos, or even the entire camera roll, to wirelessly sync with our Cinq folder.

But hey — Cinq is less than a week old, so hopefully future software updates will make this a really sweet app. It’s a free download in the iTunes App Store; there’s also a $2 version that’s ad-free.

See Also:

• Wired's 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• 10 Most Awesome iPhone Apps of 2008
• Wired.com Readers' Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009

Updates have been coming fast and furious to Google’s Android Market for a couple weeks now, but this is the biggest shift yet — that rusty tab-based interface is out, replaced with a rotating carousel of downloadable content, and a single scrolling pane of info for each and every app. What’s more, it seems that Mountain View has heard the cries of game companies in particular, as it’s got a couple of very special changes largely targeted at them — the size cap on individual apps has been upped to 50MB, and Android Market’s famous 24-hour return policy is no more. You’ll still have 15 minutes to decide whether you want a piece of software or prefer a refund, perhaps long enough to give it a basic test, but there’s no longer enough time to finish a game in one sitting before slyly giving it a pass. There’s also a number of behind-the-scenes changes that should help make sure you only see apps your device can actually run, based on screen size, pixel density and OpenGL support. Google’s pushing the update to every Android 1.6-and-above device over the next couple of weeks, so you can expect your app purchasing world to turn upside-down in time for Christmas cheer.

Update: There are also two new categories being added: widgets and live wallpapers.

Update 2: Of course, no self-respecting hacker waits for an OTA to get what they can sideload right now, and so XDA-developers is now distributing the new Android Market APK — we’d suggest you give it a try too, but we’re hearing that some folks are having difficulty downloading apps at all after the update. Still, the folks at Android Police seem to have it working, and have taken a host of screenshots of the interface. Go give them a peek at our more coverage link.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Android Market update streamlines content, nukes tabs, dismantles 24-hour return policy to appease devs originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Dec 2010 11:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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